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animats

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Everything posted by animats

  1. Please take a seat. One annoyance reported by new users is going into a room and finding it full of avatars doing nothing who won't talk to you. I previously suggested a way to avoid Linden safe hubs becoming cluttered with lost bots and AFKs. Just get them to sit down. If an avatar doesn't move or type for a long time, sit them in a seat. That's makes it clear they're waiting, not participating. It's harmless. So here's a demo, on one of my parcels. It's a simple experience script. Get within 20m of the bench, do nothing for 30 seconds, and you'll get an experience popup. If you allow it, it sits you on the bench. That's all. It won't eject an avatar. It's a light touch solution to the problem. This is most useful in places which already have an experience enabled, which Linden safe hubs do. At a hub, one would use a much longer timer, maybe an hour. 30 seconds is just for this proof of concept demo. Try the demo at http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Vallone/175/16/36 and comment, please. (Removed the extra copies of the picture. The forum uploader was reporting errors on uploads and it took several tries.)
  2. The underlying problem is that Second Life doesn't have a real hierarchy. In just about everything else in 3D editing and animation, child objects can have child objects of their own. Second Life doesn't have that. So sitting is a special purpose hack, attachments are a special purpose hack, and skeletons are a special purpose hack. Just getting the wheels on a vehicle to both steer and rotate requires workarounds. Philip Rosedale has said this was his biggest mistake when designing Second Life. (Interestingly, the server to viewer message protocol supports a full hierarchy, although the code in the LL and Firestorm viewer do not.)
  3. OK. The actual formula is max(high_tri_count, med_tri_count * 2, low_tri_count * 4, lowest_tri_count * 8) / 666.66666
  4. Duck Girl made me a low-poly mesh hoodie and sneakers for my animesh NPCs. For those, 666 triangles = 1 LI, so there's real pressure to keep the triangle count down. That was done to show it was possible. I was hoping that an SL low-poly clothing for animesh market would emerge. But it didn't.
  5. Oops, need to clarify. That's about compiling Firestorm from source code. Running it is much easier.
  6. On a related note, a common experience in SL is going someplace where there are a number of avatars standing around, not moving, not talking, and they won't respond to you. This is upsetting to new users. Sometimes they're bots. Sometimes they're AFK. Sometimes they're playing Tiny Empires. Now, this seems to be mostly a problem with Linden-run safe hubs. It's not a problem with the Firestorm new user island, or New Residents Inc, or Caledon Oxbridge. Those are not default dumping grounds for teleport failures and region restarts. What happens when the region you're in restarts may need a rethink. Right now, you get teleported to a "safe hub". That's fine. But you're not supposed to stay there. Maybe the place to which avatars get teleported on region failure should be a room in a safe hub full of teleporters to elsewhere. A mini Portal Park, like the one at Firestorm Help Island. That provides some encouragement to move on. Avatars which do nothing at a Linden safe hub for an extended period should be placed on a seat in a waiting room. Provide a few rows of airport waiting room furniture. That makes it clear who's inactive. It's a custom to not bother people in waiting rooms, so this makes sense socially. It's harmless to the avatar, and not annoying. If you go away while logged in, you find that your avatar has taken a seat in the waiting room. Reasonable enough. A Linden experience can handle the mechanics of that. Suggested avatar waiting room. Please take a seat.
  7. Firestorm built nicely against the native libraries on Ubuntu Linux 18.04 LTS. It didn't for 16.04 LTS, and I'm told it doesn't for 20.04 LTS, but I haven't tried.
  8. The current LL viewer runs on Linux under the Wine 6.0 emulator. Even voice works. This is on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. However, the LL auto-updater crashes in that environment. That's not fatal; you can still use SL, but each time you log in, you get error messages as the auto-updater crashes. I've filed a JIRA. Firestorm for Linux works fine. Including voice chat, although you may have to install some 32-bit libraries and run Vivox under Wine, which happens automatically. I've filed a Firestorm bug report asking that Firestorm check that all the components Vivox needs are present, since Vivox itself is too dumb to do that. Voice calls (non-local chat) don't seem to work. Philip Rosedale's company, "High Fidelity" is now selling their own voice chat system. Maybe SL will convert.
  9. SL isn't new user hostile. It's new-user indifferent. This can be frustrating. There are new user friendly places, of course. Almost all places of business, and all roads, are open to all users. Some of the more visible pretty destinations do restrict new users. Those are usually isolated private islands. Mainland is seldom that restricted, although some people wall off their parcels with ban lines. Usually those are residences.
  10. Clean room boots, class 1000. Standard commercial product. So that's roughly what you want. You could start with this basic, full perm, all assets boot kit from Meli Imako. They're very plain Ugg-style boots. Rexturing alone would get you adequate clean room boots. Wrinkles can be drawn in. For a first cut, just put a wrinkled paper texture onto the boot model. If you take the 3D model into Blender, you can remove some shoe details, simplify, and make a closer match to RL clean room boots. Boost the width and height about 20% so they fit over existing shoes. You can probably advertise for someone to do this for you. Depends on how accurate a model you need.
  11. If you really want a fast bike, go to one of the tracks that has many shops. 2RAW Extreme has about 20 sellers of cars and bikes. Try them on the track. You're limited more by how well you can drive than by how fast the vehicle can go.
  12. Some of those bots need to be made smarter. There's a stack of them piled up behind a sign at the Oritz safe hub in Zindra. If you're going to put scripted agents in world, please do enough scripting that when they end up somewhere useless, they recover, or alarm, or something. Maybe SL should require that to operate a bot, you must have a private parcel they can use as home. Then, when lost, they go to their own home, instead of piling up at the Linden centers for homeless avatars.
  13. I'd like to see "away" avatars (no recent inputs from the viewer) displayed on the map with a different color dot. That would make it clearer which ones have a user, or at least a semi-intelligent program, behind them.
  14. Set up a personal lighting environment with a white ambient light and no sun or moon, and you'll get something close to what you want.
  15. Yes, please make that connection. There are a few other places in world where things almost connect, but that's for another day.
  16. Yes. I've seen "offline" with someone I'm standing in front of, and we're both friends.
  17. Here's a good overview of that style. "American Look" (1958), sponsored by Chevrolet. From the Library of Congress film preservation project. An excellent overview of mid-century American design.
  18. And, for the commercial district... It's Un-American to miss the Cavalcade of Chrome! That would be a fun build for a shopping event. There's a whole series of Bruce McCall takes on mid-century design. He did many New Yorker covers with such themes.
  19. I'm not seeing a problem. I looked at the browser log to see if it didn't like anything: Cookie “_slm_session” will be soon rejected because it has the “SameSite” attribute set to “None” or an invalid value, without the “secure” attribute. To know more about the “SameSite“ attribute, read https://developer.mozilla.org/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Set-Cookie/SameSite marketplace.secondlife.com Ignoring unsupported entryTypes: largest-contentful-paint. marketplace.secondlife.com:6:16999 No valid entryTypes; aborting registration. marketplace.secondlife.com:6:16999 Ignoring unsupported entryTypes: layout-shift. marketplace.secondlife.com:6:17095 Loading failed for the <script> with source “https://www.googletagmanager.com/gtm.js?id=GTM-NTP4ZDK”. marketplace.secondlife.com:1:1 Cookie “” has been rejected as third-party. gtm.js This page uses the non standard property “zoom”. Consider using calc() in the relevant property values, or using “transform” along with “transform-origin: 0 0”. marketplace.secondlife.com JQMIGRATE: Migrate is installed, version 3.0.1 application-f0edea18a8b197ada1ccbcb67742677e.js:30909:19 Loading failed for the <script> with source “https://cdn.optimizely.com/js/981600111.js”. marketplace.secondlife.com:20:1 The resource at “https://js-agent.newrelic.com/nr-1209.min.js” was blocked because content blocking is enabled. I have third party cookies, trackers and ads blocked, but that didn't seem to impact anything important. None of the above errors are serious.
  20. Classic Linden homes. Mostly vacant. There's an Eichler-type house on Marketplace. If that's what you want, you can get it now. A whole neighborhood of those houses on mainland, with a '50s car in every driveway, would be amusing. Put in a 50's diner and soda fountain, a drive-in theater, and a gas station. Or find a roadside area that has the retail and some abandoned land out back, and build a subdivision.
  21. I know. It took them ten years of steady growth. And rewriting their system several times. Since they recently went public, you can read their SEC registration filing, which tells a lot about where they are and where they're going. I met the Roblox CEO a long time ago, when he had a tiny physics engine company in an an alley off 8th St south of Market in San Francisco. Back then he was making educational products.
  22. Probably because others could obtain it by sampling. For what it's worth, here are concurrency numbers for SL and competitors, with links to the data source. Second LIfe (47,211 now) Decentraland. (201 now.) That's the server status page. Sominum Space (31 now.) Click on "Visit popular parcel" to see the busiest parcels and add up the numbers. Roblox (1,798,621 now) VRchat (16,925 now) IMVU - no info source found Facebook Horizons - no info source found Minecraft - no info source found
  23. Then, there's Sominium Space. This was supposed to be a high-end metaverse. Supports VR, supposedly scalable to very large sizes, allows building. I hadn't looked at in a while. Today I did. This is the map of Sominium Space. The whole world. A "small" parcel, the smallest size square you see there, is 200 m^2. The most popular parcel right now. 6 users, somewhere. This is with the web client, which is limited, but you can log in and chat. I thought this whole system was on Spatial OS and very scaleable. But apparently not. It's not very big, and the busiest parcel has 6 users right now. All the listed "popular parcels" together have 22 connected users. You can build, using what seems to be a dumbed-down version of Unity. You can place and color objects from their inventory. You can't make new mesh objects. You then upload your entire parcel. They have events. Here's the calendar. A full schedule of exciting events! This place sucks. (But they get more press than Second Life.)
  24. More true than I thought. Here's the link for Decentraland's concurrent user count: https://catalyst-monitor.vercel.app/ Right now, 199 users are online there. Highest I've seen is 360, on a Friday evening. That's after 16 months of operation. They're going nowhere as a virtual world. Worry about IMVU and Roblox, which have far higher user counts than SL and are steadily improving.
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